ESY

Summer has begun again! I changed my last adult diaper today, and there are two full weeks before I have to report back in for the new school year.

What is ESY?  It stands for Extended School Year. It's not summer school -- it's only for special education students whose IEPs indicated that they would have a severe regression in their learning if they did not receive any schooling throughout the summer. Our goal is to "contain and maintain!" (I admit, I made that motto up, but it does do a good job of summarizing things).

This was my second summer working ESY. I was an IA (Instructional Assistant) in a Cat B classroom. In English, that means that I was assigned to help a teacher with students who are much more severely affected by their disabilities than your typical special education student. For example, during the school year I work as a teacher with Cat A LD/ED. I still teach from the same textbooks and lab guides as all of the other general education teachers in the school. Over the summer, there was one student I spent a whole day with trying to teach her how to recognize the number six.

Overall, I'm very glad that I did it. Working with a different population of kids can be refreshing and eye-opening. Plus, being an IA instead of a teacher allows me to work with kids and not worry about the mountains of paperwork and non-instructional work teachers are required to do.

[FYI - this is going to be a long post. I've been meaning to write about my summer job all summer, so there's a lot of things to say. I wrote notes about every day of my first week down way back when! I'm going to condense everything (of course), because I don't want to be too brutally assaulted by an overabundance of words when I click 'read more.']

Before the kids
Like any teacher job, the staff shows up on site long before the students. I received an email indicating there was a training from 9:30 to 12:30 the Thursday before the first week of ESY. A half day doesn't sound like a bad way to start a job, does it?

Nope! It's a great way to start!

Too bad it didn't happen like that. The email only listed training times, but Thursday was supposed to be a full day of work. I found this out, after I found out that the training all IAs were told to attend wasn't for IAs. There are two IAs assigned to every teacher. The teachers were going to be in the training. We were told to "hang out and try to find something to do." For the next three hours, over half of the ESY staff sat around, talked, and twiddled fingers while the other half sat in a training that was supposed to be for everyone.

ESY is not very organized. It's unfortunately part of the nature of the beast (but I'll talk more about that later). I'm laid back by nature, so the down-time didn't bother me beyond marveling at the inefficiency of it all. I used some of the down time to go find lunch, because I had not figured I would need to bring one for a three hour work day. Later, I found out that the IAs were supposed to be at the training, but the trainer had refused.

Further evidence that ESY was going to have a rocky start appeared at a break-neck pace.
-The teacher I was assigned to missed the first day of work.
-There was a stack of student files in the room that did not match the inventory next to them.
-I went to the office to tell them and they said "oh yeah, everything's changed." Things would continue to change AFTER the kids began school as well.
-Half of the phones in the rooms did not function. This made calling parents for introductions highly difficult.
-The blackboard had some sort of air bubble in the middle of it that collapsed when written on.
-blah, blah, blah, the floors were messy, blah blah blah, done.

Administration
Anyone who read Before the Kids may be making the assumption that the administrators at my ESY site were about as intelligent as monkeys who can't figure out how to fling poop. Wrong! The people in charge were actually very very good at their job. One of them even turned out to be the wife of my brother's high school wrestling coach!

Instead, it felt like central office and transportation were trying to sabotage everything. I remember standing in the office at one point and overhearing some of the situations they were dealing with. I want to say I remember hearing one conversation that sounded something like "What kid are you talking about? He's not on my lists and we have no files for him. You never sent them?" Because I wasn't the one dealing with all of the fires, the whole situation was comical. Bus routes changed hourly, the student population grew and shrank with each new phone call from central, and the people in charge were so busy trying to figure out what was going on that everyone else was left to our own devices. I don't think things really settled down for the admin until today.

Helping the admin were the usual horde of administrative interns. I think the school system counts on the bumper crop of aspiring principals each summer and uses their volunteer hours to forgo hiring more staff to help.  Intern quality can vary, but we had a decent crop this summer. Their inexperience doesn't make things run any smoother the first week. There was one week there was a bus situation and one of them handed me his walky-talky as I was walking by. Over his shoulder, he asked me to man his post while he ran off to deal with a problem.

Co-workers
This summer, I was blessed (again) with great co-workers. I'd work with any of them again in a heartbeat.

The first person I met was Naila. It turns out she worked with my new Department Chair before she transferred to my school!  She brought me tea leaves from her country one day and made chai for all of us the last week of school even though she was fasting for Ramadan. I'll never forget the day she came in laughing about something she'd heard on the radio on her drive in. "Testicle car bumpers"

Next, there was Charlie. At first, I was a little worried when I heard he had missed the first day. My worries were unfounded. Charlie was a veteran teacher and happened to teach one of our students during the year and had taught others in ESY before. We got to know each other pretty well while changing diapers (more on that later). He's going to be retiring at the end of the upcoming school year which is great for him and sad for me since I won't get a chance to work with him again.

The last person I met was Lisa. She wasn't technically staff, but an intern. She's an assistant in the next county over and taking classes to become a teacher. Summer school was her chance to complete her internship hours and when the call went out, Charlie volunteered to be her supervising teacher. Lisa was extremely motivated and organized and set up most of the lessons and stations around the classroom each day. There was no slacking summer or not. That didn't mean she was uptight, though. I remember helping her with a role-playing lesson about eye contact in front of her instructor and she brought in almond butter for all of us to soothe Naila's curiosity about it (we had a student who ate it every single day).

There were other people I worked with, but not on a daily basis. One of the computer lab instructors happened to be an itinerant assigned to my school during the school year. Then there was the social worker that ended up visiting us most days. She would wear shirts from different Pittsburgh sports teams once she realized it would rile Charlie and I up! One of the administrators was actually a "Teacher for life!" and one of the assistants in the classroom behind me used to go to my church.  Then another assistant from the other classroom adjacent to us was a good friend of Naila's. She knew several of our students and would visit during the day or chase them down the hallway in jest.

I worked with a great corp of people for the second summer in a row!

First week Chaos
In a nutshell: the whole first week was merry chaos.

Some highlights from the first week:
-A student who was not supposed to be in ESY somehow showed up in my class.
-She was deaf and not severely intellectually disabled.
-There weren't any staff at our site who knew sign language.
-Boy was she surprised! I ended up working with her the second half of the day and she taught me some signs.
-There was a mother who pulled her student out of her class when she didn't recognize any of us. The student was moved next door to where she knew one of the IAs.
-There was one student who we ALMOST got whose parents were in the middle of a highly contentious lawsuit. I've never read an IEP that sounded more like something Congress would vote on. It was intense.
-The morning meeting started with the admin announcing "It's going to suck." Everyone laughed.
-The afternoon meeting started with the admin announcing "I told you it would suck. And you all laughed!"
-Bus procedures for arrival and dismissal changed on a daily (and something twice daily) basis.
-Several parents of the kids in our class didn't realize school had started
-New students were assigned midweek
-Staff meetings every morning and afternoon

Almost everyone on staff was an ESY veteran, so all of these things were mostly handled without incident.

Mostly.

Some Highlights From the Remaining Weeks
-Pushing the broken powered-wheel chair in the 100 degree heat with the girl having vomit leak through her nose. Then I found out that the nurse still had the break on (not that I wanted to mess with all the wires and apparatus that helped the kid eat, breathe and who knew what else).
-The week of heat. That was a lot of fun walking kids around to their buses in a heat index of 115 degrees....and then the Jetta's A/C was broken for the ride home! Hot, hot, hot.
-One of the kids was so hot one day he decided to strip on the bus.
-I caught a runner who made a break for it once, too. Probably because the heat made him want to get on his bus before it was even done pulling up!
-To try and teach one kid her address, I sang it to the tune of "Mary Had  a Little Lamb."  That song was sung all summer long and it brainwashed all of my coworkers and some of the other students in the room. Just not the one I was trying to teach it to. "6, 8, 2, 9, blah blah blah!"
-I had one kid that took close to 15 minutes to walk to and from her bus. She'd stop and try to look at everything or decide she didn't want to move. Wheelchair lifts mesmerized her and we'd be stuck waiting until they went away. She had orthopedic and balance problems so I couldn't just tug on an arm or push to get her moving, because it may have caused her to fall and hurt herself.  Eventually, I learned the fine art of moving her around efficiently.
-I've never had so much trouble keeping a kid's hands off of his penis as I did with one of the kids I worked with. He was also obsessed with snakes, napkins and strings....all of which he wanted to put between his legs.
-There was a sign-language itinerant who stopped by weekly to train me in sign....for a kid who never bothered to come to ESY! Eventually, she just stopped coming, but I picked up a thing or two.
-I'll never forget Charlie putting Charmed on. There was no VCR in the room and he wanted something for the kids to watch so he just grabbed some DVDs...whoops!
-There was a kid with some sort of scoliosis and other body malformations I ended up helping a desperate teacher with one week. It was strange lifting a sixty-pound, eighteen year old out of a wheelchair whose body was unable to move or bend in a normal fashion. I was worried that I was going to hurt him. Thankfully he was so light that it was an easy if awkward lift.
-I joined a conga-line at the TRS prom while pushing a student in a wheelchair.

There's a ton of other memories that most people would find 'unique,' but all of them were a daily occurrence for me. They're already blurring together in my memory. The odd jobs of training kids to recognize a letter, a name, to build pizza boxes for Domino's, or to sort coins into the right piles, teaching the kids to play "not it!," or trying to coax one student into saying a word other than 'no' no longer seem as distinct as they once did.  Or at least I have fewer individual memories of each incident and the many times I did them have become as one.

ESY was a good experience for me. The money was less than I could have made as a teacher, but it helped give me new perspective on my current position and I'll invest the money to help jump-start Shane's college fund for some 18 years from now.

And with that, I close this chapter of my life. Summer has begun again before the next school year rolls in like a storm.